


A Place On The List

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, mention of bronies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 06:05:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18794473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "A random silly idea: Jack finds an iPod with different kinds of music, among them the different songs and remixes from My Little Pony: Friendship is magic. He asks around if anyone knows who it belongs to… and then it turns out that it belongs to Pitch. Why does Pitch like MLP? I’ll leave that up to the writer X3"This is set in a universe where Pitch is a much more frequently recurring adversary of the Guardians, though Jack is still new and doesn’t know that.Jack finds this ipod, he goes to ask North whose it is, and Pitch shows up in the Workshop claiming that they’ve walked into his trap by giving him a way in, but he’s in bad shape and North calls him on his BS. Turns out there’s a better reason he showed up.





	A Place On The List

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 9/12/2015.

Jack was continually amazed by the amount of, well,  _stuff_  that the Guardians all owned. He supposed it was understandable in North’s case, since North was expected to be at the North Pole three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, and he had to have everything there to keep a lot of yetis, elves, and reindeer happy, as well as everything needed to make thousands and thousands of presents. Tooth and her fairies, though—the palace actually had living quarters, and it turned out she and a lot of her fairies had small personal collections—or, rather, collections of small things. After a few centuries, even very careful curating couldn’t always help. Sandy—well, when Jack visited his island it wasn’t too clear if a lot of the stuff he had seen was actually physical or just manifesting from dreamsand , but if it was just dreamsand Sandy wouldn’t have wanted to give him a tour or seemed so surprised at some of the things they found while walking around. Even Bunny, who Jack thought would be the least tied down to objects, had the most comprehensively supplied candy kitchen that probably existed anywhere, and the less said about his personal art studio, the better. (“Did the nightmares do this?” “No. Don’t tell North or Tooth about the state of the room.”)  
  
So, all in all, he realized that he shouldn’t have taken the shoes as some grave insult. Stuff happened. Maybe not for him, because he didn’t have a home base, but even if he was amazed at what the other Guardians had, it was time to stop being surprised.  
  
His resolve weakened when he found an ipod with the vague feel of magic on it, far from any place humans could easily go. Sure, the view was amazing, but there were amazing views everywhere, with proper amounts of oxygen and more to interest a person than a ledge giving entrance to a narrow cave—narrow enough that it certainly wouldn’t let in an adult, and unexplored enough that no one would send their child in alone, even if they had been adventurous enough to travel all this way. So, it probably did belong to one of the Guardians, and wasn’t just one of North’s gifts fantastically misplaced.  
  
The thing was, though, it didn’t seem to fit any of the Guardians’ aesthetics. For one thing, it was plain black and battered, and Guardian stuff didn’t tend to  _get_  battered, no matter what happened to it physically. For another, he knew North, at least, liked to use anachronistic things sometimes because he could always make them work perfectly. He had records upon records of music that had never, ever been released that way, or at all.  
  
With nothing better to do, and hoping that the music inside would provide a clue as to who owned it, Jack put the headphones in his ears and turned it on.  
  
The first song to immediately play was from the My Little Pony show that was currently on TV, and that didn’t give him any clues at all. All the Guardians were working on getting more in touch with what kids were like these days, any one of them might have put the songs from the show on their ipod for research.  
  
Jack looked into the music library for more clues. What he found there was mostly classical, popular teenage angst, and Halloween novelty songs.  
  
Well. Maybe this wasn’t someone’s  _main_  ipod. He tucked it into his sweatshirt pocket and went to go ask North whose it was. In order for a Guardian to use something like this, North would have had to make it in the first place.  
  
***  
  
“Ach, look at the state of this!” North said as soon as he saw the device. “Did he never think to ask for a new one?”  
  
That eliminated Tooth.  
  
“Unless,” North went on, “leaving it out is his way of asking? But how could he have guessed anyone would find it? Why not write a letter, that is guaranteed to reach me—”  
  
“Why would Bunny or Sandy need to write you a letter to talk to you?” Jack asked.  
  
North turned to him in surprise. “This doesn’t belong to Bunny or Sandy, this belongs to—”  
  
He was interrupted again as shadows flowed from the corner of the room, and, with a swirl, coalesced into Pitch Black. “Ha!” he said. “You fell right into my trap! That’s mine, and it’s my right to follow it to wherever it is to retrieve it, and now I’ve got the entire North Pole at my mercy!”  
  
“Shostakovitch!” North muttered. He grabbed a calendar and started flipping through it. “Is it time for attacks on Christmas already? This means we are way behind schedule, that is bad, very bad.”  
  
“Get back, Pitch!” Jack readied his staff for an attack. Some of this situation didn’t seem to add up, but he wasn’t about to let Pitch attack the Workshop. “We beat you before and we can do it again!”  
  
“First of all, it’s September, so you can put that calendar down and pay attention, and second of all, I’m not here for a direct attack! I’m just here to retrieve my property and,” Pitch laughed, “one or two other things.”  
  
He darted for the door, but before he could even take a step, North grabbed him by the shoulders and sat him down in a nearby chair. “Do you really want to be taken seriously right now?” North asked.  
  
He sounded…concerned, and Jack, puzzled, relaxed and stepped forward. The first thing he noticed was that Pitch looked…shabby. His hair was messy and limp, the shadows around his eyes were darker than ever, his eyes themselves were a flat gray, all his bones seemed sharper than before, and his robes were a rusty, faded black, frayed and ill-fitting, not the void-like shadow Jack had seen him cloak himself in before. In short, he looked like he no longer looked the way he did on purpose.  
  
“Of course not,” Pitch said almost-sweetly.  
  
“He’s just trying to make you let your guard down!” Jack exclaimed, and Pitch glared at him.  
  
North gave a long-suffering sigh. “Pitch, why are you trying this so soon? Is Manny goading you again? At least you are smart enough this time not to attack the children, we cannot ever relent in that case.”  
  
“A few nightmares is not an  _attack_ ,” Pitch scoffed.  
  
“Stealing all important memories is, though,” North said sternly. “And you have strange definition of ‘few’. But again, why are you here? You are not fully recovered, but Halloween is very soon. Why not wait until you are at least more…credible a threat?”  
  
Pitch stared at North, but North just stared back, clearly prepared to wait all day for Pitch to have an answer. “I came here,” he finally said, hanging his head in defeat, “for anything I could get. A glass of eggnog. A sugar cookie. Even a slice of stale fruitcake from your workshop has more power in it than I do right now.”  
  
North frowned and raised his eyebrows. “Is it because of the nightmares? I could have told you it was very bad idea to mess with dreamsand.”  
  
“No! And I knew not to replicate  _your_  mistakes, thank you very much! And regardless, I can’t wait till Halloween because I won’t make it till Halloween. I’d laugh about you having to deal with a shiny new me, then, but I am, strangely, partial to my own existence. And I’m not strong like Sandy, it wouldn’t be just a retreat.”  
  
“Was it because of Jack? You had weakened most of us pretty badly, but, still, could have made a big difference.”  
  
“No! It was not because of Jack. Now either murder me or give me a cookie and my ipod, these are your only options at this point.”  
  
“I am just trying to figure out how we should approach next situation!” North said.  
  
Before Pitch could respond, Jack jumped in. “Why do you have songs from My Little Pony on you ipod?”  
  
Pitch leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. “This is my least favorite interrogation I have ever experienced. Obviously it was a mistake, and probably that’s why my powers have decreased so dramatically.”  
  
“Pitch, you cannot be defeated by songs about friendship,” North pointed out, like it was something that was possible for other beings and perhaps Pitch might have forgotten his own resistance to this method.  
  
“Well, it must have been related somehow.” Pitch turned to Jack. “Aren’t you going to laugh?”  
  
“What do you think of Discord?” Jack asked, and Pitch groaned and closed his eyes.  
  
“Wait!” North said. “I have a feeling! I have to check something!” He let go of Pitch, who didn’t move, and grasped his left forearm with his right hand, covering the “NICE” tattoo. “Aha!” He bent down to grab Pitch’s shoulders and hauled him to his feet. “You’re there!” He swung him around. “What did you do? Tell us all about it!”  
  
“Shouldn’t you check twice?” Pitch said, looking a bit queasy from North’s makeshift waltz.  
  
“No,” North said. “Is clear. You did something very good.”  
  
“And that’s why I’m dying!” Pitch snapped.  
  
“Good deeds can kill you?” Jack asked wonderingly.  
  
“No,” North said. “That is not how this works. Tell us the story! This is very exciting! And—oh yes, we will get cookies.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper and dropped it into a pneumatic tube capsule and sent it on its way.  
  
After the woosh and thunk, Pitch visibly relaxed. “I suppose I can skip an explanation of the merits of escapism? Well, I thought it might do me some good to watch something that had nothing to do with who I am. And I…suppose…friendship…is a nice concept. And everything was going along fine, until I started noticing that some little girls were starting to have fears associated with the show, and that just seemed so nonsensical that I had to investigate it. What could be scary about colorful ponies? I mean, I was even sort of thinking that the nightmares are going to have to have a new form, but then there have always been horse girls, right? And then I found out that these girls weren’t scared of the horses, they were scared of grown men who were hanging around and, to make a long story short, I regained control of the nightmares and didn’t change their forms after all and I sicced them on rather a lot of men.”  
  
“Are you saying you used up all your power in a righteous crusade against creepy bronies?” Jack asked.  
  
“Must you put it that way?”  
  
North slapped Pitch on the back. “Ha!” he said, “You must have tangibly protected some children as well, otherwise you would not be so firmly on nice list now. We will make a Guardian of you yet!”  
  
“If I wasn’t dying I would leave,” Pitch said, offended. “You know nothing of fear and its intricacies. I acted purely as a boogeyman.”  
  
“Okay, okay,” North said. He winked. “Hold your horses. I am going to ask for some eggnog to be brought up here, too.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Tags from Tumblr:  
> #an interesting question here: does Pitch only get power from children fearing him #even though he can scare anybody? 
> 
> Comments from Tumblr:  
> bowlingforgerbils said: what a brilliant use of MLP. Pitch is #1 on my nice list.
> 
> mira-eyeteeth said: AAAAHHHH PITCH YOU ADORABLE DOOFUS


End file.
